Yes or notes

” Every form of creation is born from an impulse, an irrepressible need, a “raw” intention that one feels as a duty, that of transforming an intuitive abstraction into something to share.
We just know that we have to let this force out, otherwise we explode.
This irrepressible “ex-pression” is like a ball of energy. It moves us without our necessarily “understanding” it.

It is this pressure from within that is sometimes referred to as “inspiration”.
Whether writing, visual art or music, whether a theorem, a city plan or a video game, creation often happens in stages.
Like the erosion of a rock, little by little, over time, an idea matures, settles, is distilled and refined, as water smooths a pebble.

But ideas don’t always come at once. So conversely, creation takes place like a deposit of sediment, by addition.

Moods are fleeting, and if you are afraid of losing them, you have to dare to be impatient. Act swiftly. Throw yourself into it. Listen to the “whims”, quivering like ripples on water. A subtle, transparent shiver. Above all, don’t put off until later what might wither if you start to think about it.
Often the meaning comes only with hindsight and a certain distance.

Yes, creation is a dance, an approaching movement. Step by step, like a feline advancing in the savannah towards a prey that it suspects is there. It senses it, without seeing it.
A creator is enticed by desire, the desire for pleasure. This exalted joy that comes from the act of creating, from the invention that transforms us into demiurges, this incandescent gesture at the junction between the infinite unconscious and the precise consciousness.

We are certain, Yes.
Certain that we have to “Do”.
In the absolute, absolutely.
Doing for the pleasure of doing.
Doing in the moment.
Doing before it fades away.
Doing in the dream of perfecting yourself.

A voracious artist, eager to see himself interpreting reality, with a certain undefined idea of what he is looking for, that oeuvre hidden away amid the dry grass of our mental savannah.
Like a work that often takes root at the intersection of public and private worlds, a song is a fusion, a mixture.

Ink fades in the sun, paper yellows or withers… Not to mention the mixed concepts that last only the duration of a summer, a love, a sorrow, an adventurous youth, between “repentances” [deletions] and fleeting thoughts, songs never remain “forever”.

If a poem is a soliloquy, a song is an encounter.
A song is a low wall built with words of stones, and harmonies that cement them. The words, their sounds, their meanings, and then the melody that joins them together to give them sometimes even an “other” meaning…

Yes or not,
Not on the note.
Notes taken in notebooks, notebooks of notes, on scraps of paper, paper tablecloths, photocopies, administrative forms or whatever.
When we create, we convince ourselves, we want to be sure of ourselves, at least certain that we MUST act. Sure and solid, like metal, sure as iron.

And then we question ourselves… invaded by doubt.
Doubting everything, everyone,
Doubting oneself, doubting the world.
Cutting, pasting, taping, scribbling, doodling,
Marking out, mixing, correcting.
All means are allowed.

It is no longer a question of being right.
Beauty isn’t always obvious.
Certainly it is sometimes “brutal” like a necessity, but other times it is a subtle whisper, barely visible, like a cloud, a mist; lurking in the shadows of our reptilian brains, only accessible by taking hidden paths, off the map. Beauty is susceptible, versatile and fanciful; it rarely lets itself be approached by the most direct routes.

Yes or Notes?
In the spires of creation, in the spheres of Art, you often find yourself right when you let yourself lose yourself.

I would like to thank the Christian Berst gallery for giving me the opportunity, through this “dialogue” Yes or NOTES, to share the slow approach of my cut and pasted writings made in the ’80s, in parallel with a selection of works of art invented in the extreme recesses of this fascinating ART BRUT, the values of which the gallery defends.
I have composed these duets as juxtaposed notes, in thirds, fourths, fifths, majors, minors, in harmony/dysharmony, modal or polyphonic associations, random or serial, in dissonance AND in “unreasonable” resonance.”

CharlElie COUTURE